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CAPEN: I'd like to delve into the past as our departure point. You were, at one time, a merchant seaman, and I wonder how this came about.

AUSTER: It's true, I did work for about six months on an Esso oil tanker. I got the job after I left college. I didn't know what I wanted to do in life. I didn't want to be an academic, which is probably what I was best suited for, but I just didn't want to be in school anymore, and the idea of spending my life in a university was just awesomely terrible. I had no real profession, no trade, I hadn't really studied for anything. All I wanted to do was write -- at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

It turned out that my stepfather, who was a person I was very close to, the person to whom I dedicated Moon Palace, Norman Schiff, a wonderful man who earned his living as a labor lawyer and negotiator. One of his clients was the Esso Seamen's Union, a company union. So I knew all about these ships and as I was about to leave school I said, "Norman, do you think you can get me a job on a ship?" and he said "I'll take care of it for you." It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and you can't get seaman's papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me. So I shipped out. It's quite amusing, I went through all the exams, I got my papers, and then I had to sit around and wait until a ship from the fleet came into the New York area with an opening, and it was unclear how long this wait was going to be.

In the meantime -- this is 1970 -- I took a job with the U.S. Census Bureau. In The Locked Room, the third volume of the New York Trilogy, there's a sequence where the narrator talks about working for the census, and I took this straight from life. As in the book, I wound up inventing people. Kind of curious. Anyway, right around that time I had a problem with a wisdom tooth and I had to go to the dentist to have the thing pulled out, and it was while I was sitting in the chair in the dentist's office, the dentist had picked up this big pair of pliers and was just about to yank out my tooth when the telephone rang. It was my stepfather, who said, "Well, the ship is here. You gotta go, you have to report. Within two hours you have to be on the ship." So I remember jumping out of the dentist's chair with the bib on me and I said, "Sorry, I have to leave," and I ran out and signed on this ship in Elizabeth, New Jersey. And had this tooth taken out a week later in Texas, in Baytown, Texas.

The ship travelled around the Gulf of Mexico, and it was all new to me, I hadn't been in the South, I hadn't been in Texas, and I learned a lot during those months. Then -- it's quite well-paid -- I'd saved up several thousand dollars, and it was with that money that I managed to move to Paris, where I spent the next three or four years.

CAPEN: This was key for you, this move. What was your experience of Paris? It almost seems like you learned the meaning of being a writer there.

AUSTER: Well, it was certainly a fundamental time. I had been writing before that, very much wanted to do this with my life, I'd already decided. But those years when I was a student were crazy times in America. We're talking about the late '60s and Columbia University, where I was a student, was a particular hotbed of activity, and I was swept up in a lot of it and compelled by a lot of it, I found it irresistable. As a consequence I didn't really do as much writing as I would've hoped. I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went. The fact is, by the time I got back it was certain to me that this is what I was doing with my life, there was no turning back.

CAPEN: You entered into it in what may be the most obscure way, through French poetry, translations of surrealist works. So that the '70s were that sort of period for you. Then in the '80s you came into your own as a novelist, and from there it's skyrocketed into this decade.

AUSTER: The funny thing is, as a young person I was trying to write prose, and I wrote a lot of it, but I was never satisfied with the results. Two of the novels I wound up finishing and publishing later I started very early on, in my early 20's, In The Country Of Last Things and Moon Palace. Both of those books I worked a great deal on but never quite got a grip on either one. I put them aside and at a certain point decided I couldn't write prose, and I would just stick to writing poetry. I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table. That was very grinding and unpleasant, I really didn't like it. I wound up translating a lot of mediocre books, badly written books on subjects that had no interest to me, for pay that was disastrously low. At a certain I realized I would've done better as a short-order cook somewhere. I mean, it was that bad.

In the mid-70s I wrote some plays, also, but it wasn't until the very late '70s when I ran into a real crisis on every level, personal, artistic, and I was absolutely broke, I'd run out of money and...hope, I guess, and I stopped writing altogether for awhile. The only thing I actually did during that perod was write a detective novel under another name, in about six weeks, just to make money, I was so desperately poor, so that was actually the first novel I wrote. This period went on for about a year and a half and I produced absolutely nothing. When I started writing again in late '78, it was prose, and the fact is I haven't written a poem since then. I absolutely stopped, and absolutely started again, and the two parts of my life as a writer are very different.

CAPEN: Not many poets come out of Brooklyn, although Whitman certainly is a notable exception.

AUSTER: Actually Brooklyn has a long literary history, and we shouldn't forget it, Walt Whitman being the most important. Quite a few of the great 20th century poets, the Objectivists, lived in Brooklyn, Louis Zukovsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and probably one of the great 20th century poems, The Bridge, written by Hart Crane, was composed in Brooklyn. In fact there are few places in America with a greater poetic tradition than Brooklyn.

CAPEN: Kurt Vonnegut feels that once he's finished a book, the work is out of his hands, it's out in the world, and it takes on a life of its own. You share this view?

AUSTER: Well, I agree with that completely. The book is your book. You have been responsible for every single thing on every page, every comma, every syllable is your work. Then you let go of it, you give it to the world and what the world makes of what you've done is unpredictable. You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either. One of my novels, City Of Glass, was turned into a comic book, the whole project initiated by my friend Art Spiegelman (Maus). And I knew that if Art was involved in this project it would be high quality so I let it happen. I think the results are terrific, by the way, I'm very impressed with what this little team did to render this book in images. Another story, The Music of Chance, was not only turned into a film but somebody made it into a ballet a couple of years ago.

Most moving and most interesting to me of all, and this is the best kind of thing that can happen to a writer, another one of my novels, In The Country of Last Things -- which as I said I started writing in 1970 and didn't manage to finish it until 1985, I worked on that book for 15 years -- about three years ago a copy of In The Country of Last Things was given to a theatre director from Sarjevo by an American or British journalist, he said, "you should read this book," and he did, under horrible circumstances, no electricity, no heat, it was winter during the siege, and he started reading and didn't stop until he had finished, he read all through the night with a candle. He felt that this book was the absolute rendition of the situation he was living at that moment. It was a kind of uncanny leap. He became so impassioned that he worked with his theatre group and turned passages of the book into a play performed in Sarajevo. Peter Brooks' company in Paris helped sponsor them to get out of Sarajevo and make a European tour.

So here's an example of a book that was written many years before this actual situation took place and yet the work of one man's imagination, in this case mine, somehow connected what he was living through at that moment, years later, and something new happened with it. I mean, books constantly change even though the words are the same. The world changes, people change, people find a book at the right moment and it answers something, some need or desire. I mean, why would I want to block something like that? I think you'd be foolish to think that you know what the fate of your work is, you see.

CAPEN: Let's get metaphysical for a moment. Do you feel as an author that you open yourself to some sort of channel and the story is out there waiting for you?

AUSTER: Well, yes, I suppose so, you just don't know how complex and mysterious the world can be. It's no accident that he should've felt that way because I very consciously was writing a book about the 20th century. In fact, all during the writing of the book I had a subtitle in mind, not that I was going to use it but it was kind of a working tool, which was "Anna Bloom Walks Through The 20th Century." That was the idea of the book. And so here in the late 20th century, yet another horror takes place, and it's not as though it's the first time this kind of thing has happened. You think sooner or later it has to end, and it doesn't. Strange things. Strange vibrations, out there.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one. It's me the writer and you the reader, and we're together on that page, and I think it's probably about the most intimate place where human consciousnesses meet. And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.

CAPEN: The titles of your books, In The Country of Last Things, City of Glass, The Music of Chance, Smoke...they sound like kernels of ideas as opposed to being derived later from an overview in the long run. Is this the case?

AUSTER: Well, it's a very interesting point. I find it impossible to start a project without the title in mind. I can sometimes spend years thinking of the title to go with the thing that's forming in my head. A title defines the project somehow and if you keep finding the ramifications of the title in the work it becomes better, I'm convinced of this. So, yeah, I think about titles a lot. Sometimes I just walk around making up titles for things that don't exist, and never will exist.

CAPEN: Back to the work, once finished, being out of your control. Philip Hass, the director, took The Music of Chance and did, to my way of thinking, a brilliant job with this, but it was completely different than the book.

AUSTER: It's funny, I was very interested in the movies as a young person and there was a time where I thought this is what I wanted to do, and then didn't, and more or less forgot about the movies as anything I was ever going to be involved with. It was only after I started writing novels that people started calling me with interest in turning these into movies, and it started me thinking about movies again. When The Music of Chance was published several people called that were interested. Philip Hass had no money and he had never made a feature film before but at least he, I felt, understood the book and was going to do an honorable job with it. Maybe...it's better not to allow this to happen. Maybe that's possible, I'm not sure, I'm of two minds about this. But I did think that of all the novels I'd ever written this one would be the most likely to be a film.

CAPEN: This idea of the intrinsic differences between the film and the novel. Annie Dillard says that "novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but ruinous odor," warns writers not to even think in those terms if you want to write a serious novel. What is your feeling about that?

AUSTER: I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films. Just about every good novel turned into a film turns out to be dissapointing. It's rare, I can only think of a few cases where the film is anywhere close to the novel. Nevertheless, I think that we are all hungry for stories, and novelists tell the best stories.

So filmmakers get intrigued by this. I don't know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn't hurt the book. I mean, if she's talking about this new, kind of commercial approach to writing books, to turn books into money, in effect, and these links between big publishing companies and film companies, and this megacorporate media howitzer that we've got in this culture now, yeah, that's disturbing, I agree. But I don't want any part of those novels either 'cause they're junk, and then they're turned into junk films. But I don't think that's what she's talking about.

CAPEN: Dillard went on to say that books can be something film cannot: literature, "a poor thing, a subtle thing -- but our own." Then too, you've referred to movies as simulacra, that two hours later you've forgotten what you've seen.

AUSTER: I think that finally good books stay with you a lot longer than even good films. And because there is this connection betweeen the mind of the reader and the words, and you have to work hard to read a book, you have to use your imagination, you're filling in all the details yourself. You're actively engaging your own history, all your soul, your memories, into what you're reading on the page. A film goes by so fast you just don't have time to get inside it in that way. It can be fun, I mean I'm not against movies, and they can be highly entertaining and diverting, and thrilling, but it's not real food the way books are, there are very few films that nurture you the way, nourish you the way, books do.

CAPEN: Smoke...Auggie Wren. Who is this guy? It was all inspired by your tin of Shimmelpenninck's.

AUSTER: Like the one I'm holding. Auggie Wren came about because of a request. The man who had taken over the Op-Ed page of The New York Times decided he was going to make it more interesting, open it up to new kinds of things, and he had the idea that there should be a work of fiction in there, a Christmas story on Christmas day, and he called me up, out of the blue. So, I thought I would like to do it, but I absolutely had no ideas. One day, when I was really running out of time, I looked down at my desk and I had a tin of these Shimmelpenninck's cigars, and I started thinking about the guy in Brooklyn I bought them from. It started generating thoughts about how you have, in a big city, relationships with people that are extremely friendly, but you couldn't call them friendships, because finally you don't know anything about the other person. This thought triggered the story.

Now, the sad thing about all this is that the man who gave me the idea, the man who used to sell me these cigars, not long after that was struck down by brain cancer and was out of commission for a long time, and just around the time the film came out he died. He was only about 50, 52, something like that. I remember I went into the store when the film came out and his partners were very moved by the whole thing. Somebody from The Daily News went and talked to them at the store, and the partner of my old friend said "You know, everybody thinks this is a nothing job, right? You're just sitting here behind the counter. But everybody comes in here and you hear the most amazing stories!" And it was as though he was Auggie! Just amazing!

So I wrote the story, and Wayne Wang, the director who lives here in San Francisco, read it in the Times, and it somehow appealed to him. You know, at first I had no interest in writing the screenplay. I was happy that he liked the story. I said "yeah, I think you could turn this into something, here it is, go with it, and god bless you and I'll see you later." But little by little he lured me into the project, he's a very clever guy, so we wound up really making the film together and then the other film as well.

As Wayne and I got to know each other better, because we worked together for several years before we got Smoke going, we really got to know each other well and we shared some...characteristics, that are maybe a little odd. On the one hand we're both very serious men and we wanted to make Smoke a very beautiful, human film. But I think as we got know each other better we understood that we both have this other side, you know, a really vulgar, silly, comical taste for nonsense. I've always been a great fan of the worst kinds of slapstick comedy. And vaudeville. I think of Blue In The Face as kind of modern day vaudeville. It's musical. Just get up there and do whatever you want. Make it entertaining and funny. I think the value of that film -- and I know it's a mess, it just had to be, we filmed it in six days -- what the strength of that film is, is its vitality. It's the feeling that you're actually seeing these actors up there on the screen who are happy to be alive in their own skins.

CAPEN: John Irving says his favorite novel is Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and he's read it perhaps a dozen times. Is there a book like that for you?

AUSTER: Well I think there are several, but if I had to say just one, one book that I keep going back to and keep thinking about it's Don Quixote. That's the one, for me. It seems to present every problem every novelist has ever had to face, and to do it in the most brilliant and human way imaginable.

CAPEN: Are you about to unveil another novel?

AUSTER: I finished a book, it's not a novel, it's a nonfiction work. It's hard to describe it. I would call it an autobiographical essay about money. It's about money, about not having money. It's called Hand To Mouth. And since finishing that, I'm creeping my way back into a novel I had started before.

CAPEN: One last thought. Lou Reed, in Blue In The Face, says he's been trying to get out of New York for 35 years, but he can't seem to leave. Is this your desire? Or have you become fabulously well-to-do, with houses scattered all over?

AUSTER: No, I don't have houses scattered here and there, but I do have one house, that I live in, all the time. I kept going back and forth for years whether I wanted to stay in New York or leave. I think, as Lou says in the film, everyone goes through this, constantly, you have this love/hate relationship to the place. But at a certain point a few years years ago I realized I had to stay. It's better for me to be there, in the long run. So...I'm staying. Maybe later, maybe somewhere down the road, I'll change my mind. But for now, and the forseeable future, I'm not going anywhere.

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